I’ve become interested in the scholarly possibilities of Twitter bots. From bots that tweet a line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “over and over” (@TweetsOfGrass), to generating tweets that sound like Buddhist koans (@Horse_ebooks), to automating the writing of Modernist poetry (@MoPoBot), Twitter bots have invaded our timelines faster than we can block them. I’m proposing a session where participants can discuss ways in which scholars could use bots for our own pursuits. This would include using bots to isolate lines from longer pieces of literature, creating algorithmic methods for writing poetry, randomizing highlights from a collection, helping with vocabulary learning, or just making witty comments to amuse ourselves during office hours. If interest exists, we could also try to hack together a Twitter bot of our own.

I’m very interested in how people research, read, and write together, and I”m also an avid user of Zotero. I’m proposing a session where Zotero users (both new & old) talk about ways to use the tool to do more than just collect and manage citations.

This would include strategies for using Zotero in writing and collaboration, approaches to using Zotero in the classroom for projects and for syllabi, practical tips and tricks for reading & note-taking, and ways of visualizing, understanding, and enhancing Zotero libraries. I’d also like to discuss the plugins that extend Zotero and, time permitting, provide a brief introduction to how one may write a Zotero translator to import citations from a source  not currently supported by the tool.